others, but if they chose to address him, they found him a
courteous and amiable companion.

The Americans formed a group by themselves. John H. Headingly was a New
Englander, a graduate of Harvard, who was completing his education by
a tour round the world. He stood for the best type of young
American,--quick, observant, serious, eager for knowledge, and fairly
free from prejudice, with a fine ballast of unsectarian but earnest
religious feeling, which held him steady amid all the sudden gusts of
youth. He had less of the appearance and more of the reality of culture
than the young Oxford diplomatist, for he had keener emotions though
less exact knowledge. Miss Adams and Miss Sadie Adams were aunt and
niece, the former a little, energetic, hard-featured Bostonian old-maid,
with a huge surplus of unused love behind her stern and swarthy
features. She had never been from home before, and she was now busy
upon the self-imposed task of bringing the East up to the standard of
Massachusetts. She had hardly landed in Egypt before she realised that
the country needed putting to rights, and since the conviction struck
her she had been very fully occupied. The saddle-galled donkeys, the
starved pariah dogs, the flies round the eyes of the babies, the naked
children, the importunate begging, the ragged, untidy women,--they were
all challenges to her conscience, and she plunged in bravely at her work
of reformation. As she could not speak a word of the language, however,
and was unable to make any of the delinquents understand what it was
that she wanted, her passage up the Nile left the immemorial East
very much as she had found it, but afforded a good deal of sympathetic
amusement to her fellow-travellers. No one enjoyed her efforts more than
her niece, Sadie, who shared with Mrs. Belmont the distinction of being
the most popular person upon the boat. She was very young,--fresh from
Smith College,--and she still possessed many both of the virtues and of
the faults of a child. She had the frankness, the trusting confidence,
the innocent straightforwardness, the high spirits, and also the
loquacity and the want of reverence. But even her faults caused
amusement, and if she had preserved many of the characteristics of
a clever child, she was none the less a tall and handsome woman, who
looked older than her years on account of that low curve of the hair
over the ears, and that fulness of bodice and skirt which Mr. Gibson has
either initiated or imitated. The whisk of those skirts, and the frank
incisive voice and pleasant, catching laugh were familiar and welcome
sounds on board of the _Korosko_. Even the rigid Colonel softened into
geniality, and the Oxford-bred diplomatist forgot to be unnatural with
Miss Sadie Adams as a companion.

The other passengers may be dismissed more briefly. Some were
interesting, some neutral, and all amiable. Monsieur Fardet was a
good-natured but argumentative Frenchman, who held the most decided
views as to the deep machinations of Great Britain and the illegality
of her position in Egypt. Mr. Belmont was an iron-grey, sturdy Irishman,
famous as an astonishingly good long-range rifle-shot, who had carried
off nearly every prize which Wimbledon or Bisley had to offer. With him
was his wife, a very charming and refined woman, full of the pleasant
playfulness of her country. Mrs. Shiesinger was a middle-aged widow,
quiet and soothing, with her thoughts all taken up by her six-year-old
child, as a mother's thoughts are likely to be in a boat which has an
open rail for a bulwark. The Reverend John Stuart was a
Non-conformist minister from Birmingham,--either a Presbyterian or a
Congregationalist,--a man of immense stoutness, slow and torpid in his
ways, but blessed with a considerable fond of homely humour, which made
him, I am told, a very favourite preacher and an effective speaker from
advanced radical platforms.